The following relates generally to the identifying of a living person.
Biometric face recognition techniques can be used to distinguish and/or identify individuals by, for example, analyzing an interocular distance and/or other features of captured images of a person in order to identify the person.
Disadvantageous with known biometric face recognition techniques, however, is that they usually cannot differentiate a living person from a dummy subject having the biometric features of a person or from an image of the person. Such differentiation is however essential when, for example, conducting so-called Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) at electronic access control gates such as e-gates or ABC gates. Dummy and liveness detection is thereby automatically performed in order to differentiate a living person from a dummy subject or from a person's image. To this end, a skin detector can for example be used as is described in printed publication DE 102007017713, its transmission diodes emitting infrared radiation at different transmission wavelengths toward the human skin. The reflected infrared radiation is detected by a reception diode of the skin detector and evaluated as to liveness detection. However, in addition to active illumination, this identification concept requires interaction with the person so that they will, for example, guide their thumb to the skin detector. Such interaction is however not always possible or practical.